The StartX Files: Between the Sheets With NExS - page 3

The New Hoosier Workshop

January 25, 2002

By
Brian Proffitt

I am going to be upfront with you right now and tell you that this
application was a little hard to review. That's because NExS is being
positioned as much more than "just" a spreadsheet app. If I were to look
at NExS from a strictly spreadsheet point of view, there is not a lot
here and I would probably wave you off and urge you to try other
application.

But there is a lot more functionality associated with NExS, enough to
give it a unique place among Linux spreadsheet programs.

Starting with the basics, the NExS interface is put together with
Motif, and it is very simple. Almost too simple. Right away, you are
going to notice a lack of multi-sheet capability, something which every
other Linux spreadsheet application provides. Basic formatting tools,
also present in the other apps in this series of reviews, are also not
present or very rudimentary. The formatting tools that were in NExS
were really hard to find, buried in the Options menu.

The available cell count on NExS sheets is healthy: with 32767
rows by 4096 columns, the 134.2 million cells is the leader for
individual data sheet size for this series.

The amount of included functions is not skimpy either: by my count,
there are 232 functions you can use in NExS. Though not the overall
leader, it's still in the middle of the pack for function
availability. Availability, though, is a bit of a misnomer. There is no
automated formula builder or function list to use in NExS. So formula
creation has to be done manually and by remembering function names and
syntax from the provided help documentation.

Interoperability is okay, though nothing very exciting. You can
import delimited text files and directly open Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel
spreadsheet files. You can also save to these binary formats and export
to text, HTML, and LaTeX formats. Running my standard cross-format
tests, I found that formulas and values came across fine, but no
formatting at all was present--everything just reverted to the standard
format for NExS.

Clearly, NExS is not something you would throw out to the general
user population at your organization. For the average user, NExS is
cumbersome and not easy to use at all.

Is NExS really the right application for the average user? Absolutely
not. If it was trying to market to this audience, I would be pulling out
all sorts of epithets to hurl at it and its makers at GreyTrout. But
that is clearly not what NeXS is to be used for. It is aimed straight at
the programmers who want a stable spreadsheet platform in Linux through
which they can channel data in neatly packaged ways.

Sure, we've seen scripting before in the other spreadsheet
applications in this series. OpenOffice, HancomOffice... most of the
apps we've looked at have some sort of scripting functionality. I have
avoided discussing these features because I have been trying to gear my
reviews for people who may not be script-writing power users.

NExS, however, has forced me to grind this policy to a complete
halt. That's because the only users who are going to get any real
benefit from NExS are the power users and the programmers. Anyone
else who tries NExS will run into a huge wall that--without programming
skills--is insurmountable.

This brings an added difficulty to this review: I am no
programmer. Thus, I cannot give an honest assessment of whether this all
works or not. If the online documentation is correct, then I have the
sense that the potential of NExS is very good. The ability to pull in
and manipulate data from any source application would be a very powerful
tool indeed. In short, NExS would be a chameleon, able to be used with
almost any data.

It is this odd bi-polar state that I must leave this review. As just
a spreadsheet, NExS is not something I would recommend. But if the API
functions as well as GreyTrout claims, then this is definitely a tool
programmers might want to take a look at.